• what about the carpetbaggers who destroyed most of the building societies in the UK in their search for ‘windfalls’ – money for nothing?
• what about the rate touts who spent years moving their debts from one interest free credit card to another – money for nothing?
• what about the TV celebrities who encouraged daytime TV viewers to consolidate all their loans into another loan – and maybe add on a wee bit for a holiday – money for nothing?
• what about the successive UK governments with their PFIs and their PPIs – keeping voters sweet today but piling up debts for the future – money for nothing?

Banks claiming to hold the ethical high ground do exist (the Co-op, Triodos, etc) – but they are minority players. Why? they have never offered ‘money for nothing’. SFAG’s nose may have been in the trough, but the reason RBS grew so dramatically under him is because wallowing in the trough became the accepted and eulogised way of life in the UK and beyond. SFAG was good at what he did, and that’s what his shareholders, his peers, his government friends wanted him to do.

As a footnote, I’ve been asked a number of times about how it feels to be working in financial services at a time when the industry is being blamed for every catastrophe facing the planet. It’s certainly changed times for people who up until a few weeks ago thought they were working for one of the world’s most successful and admired companies. As one lifetime employee told me:

It’s as if you’ve spent your life building this really posh, really successful luxury hotel where everyone wants to stay.
Then suddenly one day you find that all the money has come from a brothel which the management have been secretly running in the basement.

The person making that comment hadn’t been in receipt of any mega bonus payments either, just a regular modest annual profit share – which they had dutifully invested in bank shares.

I’m waiting for comments to come in, but in the meantime I was interested to read a report of a survey undertaken by CIO.com:

The statistics from a CIO.com survey make it clear: Open-source solutions are becoming more commonplace in corporate IT, if not precisely mundane. The study also identifies where the friction is in business open-source adoption, and which application types are most popular.

Most interesting was a 45% usage figure for OpenOffice.org – a higher market share than expected.

While following up links, I also came across this article in ZDNet about Specsavers:

Specsavers is approaching open-source software as a strategic investment that will give it control over the future direction of the company’s infrastructure. Open source means that Specsavers can choose when to upgrade and can take its choice of software packages, because they’re all interoperable … more UK companies are beginning to show a serious interest in open source. The only thing holding them back is “inertia”, Taylor said. Other UK companies with a board-level interest in open source include Malmaison and Unilever.

The UK isn’t exactly a hot bed of open source adoption, so I was pleased to find these references to point people to when they start asking questions as a result of the article in Perspectives.

Anyway, half way through the afternoon, I took a call from David Meyer at ZDNet looking for an instant reaction to the news that Microsoft have succeeded in getting ISO accreditation for their proprietary OOXML file format, in opposition to the ISO accredited ODF used by OpenOffice.org. I duly gave him a few quotes. To be honest, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Microsoft has succeeded, as one illustrious industry guru predicted two years ago.

Where does this leave OpenOffice.org? as usual, we will support whatever file formats our market present and future requires. In an ideal world, this means our engineers would just read the OOXML specification and code it up. Alas, as many commentators have pointed out, the OOXML spec is not fit for purpose, and following that route simply wouldn’t give a usable result. To quote from an engineer who works on this stuff for us and knows what he is talking about:

…there is a fundamental problem for all filter developers: the mandatory part of the OOXML spec will not be enough to implement proper MS Office filters but these filters are what the market wants. Developing an OOXML filter is totally useless as there is no application on this planet that follows this spec verbatim.

So, it’s back to the old game of five man years’ or more reverse engineering what Microsoft’s software actually does, rather than following the incomplete and inconsistent dog’s breakfast called the OOXML spec – which the world’s highest technical standards body has just blessed with an ISO number. Ho hum.

And how was the writing course? well, apart from troubles with the word processor I had to use, I thought it was a day well spent, and my piece on open source is much improved as a result. When the article comes out, I’ll let you have a look (copyright permitting) and you can judge for yourself. Meanwhile, keep on looking for similar opportunities outwith the ghetto, and never underestimate the realities of dealing with the world’s most successful monopolist.

So, two days without internet access, which did at least leave me free to concentrate on the 20+ hours of workshops over two days. The session was led by the top-tier IT management team, based on Professor Tichy and his Teachable Point of View(tm). This management guru had come into our organisation at director level and told his audience it was their job – not his – to spread his message down the organisation. Now, the first rule of consultancy is that every assignment must generate further work for the consultants. The fact that Tichy was prepared to violate this sacred principle in such a brazen and outrageous fashion immediately gained my vote.

I emerged from the two days pleasantly impressed. Some of the most fascinating periods in my professional life have been spent in organisations struggling with cultural change. There is some truly impressive work going on elsewhere in our company, and there is no reason why our people in IT should be missing out on it. This activity gets my vote.

Final high point – after the conference was over I took the Tube across London to a new hotel just down the road from our IT buildings, and decided to take a wander around and look at local pubs / restaurants. I ended up in a new-ish looking Indian restaurant, and had a Lamb Sikandari with tarka dahl and rice. It was superb – I confess to a weakness for lamb shank but his was something special – juicy, cooked to perfection, just the right amount of spices – the best meal I have eaten for a long long time. If you find yourself in London, get down to the East End and give it a try. Brilliant.

Oh, and of course the work laptop couldn’t access the internet in this hotel either. Maybe fixing that should be part of our new IT strategy….

Meanwhile of course we are still finalising the programme for the OpenOffice.org annual conference – now just ten days away, with the inevitable last minute changes to the schedule. I must also think about how I am going to organise the MarCon meeting on Tuesday and my workshop with Fridrich on Thursday.

On top of this, we have OpenOffice.org 2.3 due “real soon now”. Since we moved to a regular release schedule, some releases are more feature-rich than others. 2.3 has turned out to be quite a good one, as the feature list shows. The Press Release for this is taking shape nicely.

As if this wasn’t enough, we’ve another PR going out tomorrow – sorry, this one’s under an embargo, so you’ll have to be patient – but I expect it to set the news wires humming. I think the final version of the PR was 3.7.4, which gives you some idea that it had a lot of rework, involving dashing home to take part in international conference calls on the landline while taking calls from the day job on the mobile

The PR will announce a great piece of news from the Community, and one which justifies a lot of the things we’ve been saying about the growing importance of OpenOffice.org and the high quality of OpenOffice.org’s software quality and component based architecture. Watch this space!

However, “all work and no play” etc., so we managed to get out today for a tramp through the southern edge of the local Pentland Hills. The weather was disappointing, and the scenery pretty dull compared to the main ranges of the hills. It looks like other walkers share our opinion, as the path shown on the OS Map has vanished, leaving us to tramp across moorland. Some old Rights of Way Society signposts mark where the path used to be. We made it as far as the Covenanter’s Grave (NT078522) and then headed back home.

Another busy week in prospect next week!

However, one section did stand out. I’d lay a small bet that five years from now people will still be saying “Do you remember when that HR woman with the scary hair stood up and told us all to be Tiggers and not Eeyores“? It takes some nerve to stand up in front of a big conference hall full of tecchies and use A.A.Milne as your management guru. But, as real management gurus would tell you, if you want to change cultures, talk in stores and draw pictures – IT folk have right brains too.

Maybe this is the clue to why Linux has become so successful. It’s nothing to do with the quality of the code, nothing to do with the number of eyeballs – it’s because people relate to Tux. Never mind the code, just look at the mascot.

If so, it’s time we at OpenOffice.org had another go at acquiring a mascot. There was the debacle over Otto (it appears any hand gesture means something rude somewhere in the world). The French community have developed an attachment to La Mouette, and I’ve seen some cutesy icons from the Japanese team. But as a project we haven’t yet come up with a single mascot to capture the imagination of the cuddly toy makers.

We already produce the world’s leading open-source office suite. Maybe the absence of a cuddly toy is all that’s stopping us achieving world desktop domination. Go to it, OpenOffice.org tiggers!

p.s. before anyone posts a comment about Tigger taking Eeyore from behind in the illustration – remember this is a children’s book from a more innocent age

I used to be a fairly regular business traveller from Edinburgh to London, but then a few years ago the train operator changed its regular traveller scheme to be much less rewarding than the airline’s … and so I stared flying. OK, it wasn’t quite as clear-cut as that, but that’s how business travellers think. Understand your market.

Anyway, being much greener these days, I decided to try the train again yesterday. A gang of us from the day job were going down from Edinburgh to London for an awards bash (something else that will go with global warming…). I decided to take the train, leaving the office at about 12:15 – not much earlier than most of my colleagues. I arrived in London at 16:55, and was at the hotel about the same time as the others.

However, what really impressed me about the train was the on-board WiFi (free in First Class – it should be). With a mobile phone, full internet access (including ssh), comfortable seats, free coffee, and four and a half hours of quality time – you can get an awful lot done.

Alas, on the return trip this morning, I couldn’t get any internet connectivity. I rang the helpdesk, and had this slightly surreal conversation:

Which train are you on?
The 8 o’clock from King’s Cross to Edinburgh
Which coach are you in?
L
Ah, the whole train is down. I’ll just get the guard to re-boot the server.

And, as you can see, this standard helpdesk response of “switch it off and on again” worked, and in time it took me to write this, I’m fifty miles or so nearer Edinburgh.

You can’t do that on a plane.

Like most big corporations, we have a small army of HR people who try and ensure salaries are in line with the market. In my area of IT, they seem to get it about right: I did a lot of recruiting last year, and candidates accepted the offers we made, and I don’t know of a single person last year who quit on salary grounds.

While this works at the margin, it is not so comfortable for current employees. Over the past five years, salary scales have shown little movement; adjusted for inflation, they are actually declining. It is easy to hypothesise the reasons – for example, there are thousands of skilled IT people in Bangalore who are only to happy to bid for the UK’s IT business.

Is history repeating itself – are today’s UK IT workers facing the same fate as the UK coal miners twenty years’ ago? Will IT folk accept that they are never going to share in the wealth which they are helping to create? How will we persuade talented people to come into the profession?

‘Matching the market’ sounds like a plausible and responsible salary policy. In practice, it results in a small number of major IT employers watching each other, and abdicating responsibility for providing any ‘thought leadership’ for the future of their profession. The profession deserves better.

Not quite. This gem came out as a global email:

Important information for XP Users Logging on to an NT Machine

Your XP account allows you to logon to NT Workstations. However, there are some things you should be aware of that will help prevent any issue when logging back onto XP.

Outlook 97 may not start on NT 4.0 if you have logged on to XP and used Outlook 2003

If Outlook 97 fails to start (Dr Watsons), then start it with /Clean Views. To do this, enter the following in the Start/Run menu option:

“C:\program files\microsoft office\office\outlook.exe” /cleanviews

Your recurring appointments may become corrupt

Do not edit, change or accept recurring appointments when logged onto Windows NT/Outlook 97. If you do, they may corrupt irrecoverably.

So Microsoft clearly got that one right then. I particularly liked the idea that the poor user has to run a command-line program to fix the bug. I thought only Linux users had to do that sort of horrid hack? I also like the idea that the solution to being unable to access your email may be found in … an email sent out previously.

So when you hear that sticking with Microsoft is the easy option – caveat emptor.